About Me

Known principally for his weekly political columns and his commentaries on radio and television, Chris Trotter has spent most of his adult life either engaging in or writing about politics. He was the founding editor of The New Zealand Political Review (1992-2005) and in 2007 authored No Left Turn, a political history of New Zealand. Living in Auckland with his wife and daughter, Chris describes himself as an “Old New Zealander” – i.e. someone who remembers what the country was like before Rogernomics. He has created this blog as an archive for his published work and an outlet for his more elegiac musings. It takes its name from Bowalley Road, which runs past the North Otago farm where he spent the first nine years of his life. Enjoy.

Bowalley Road Rules

The blogosphere tends to be a very noisy, and all-too-often a very abusive, place. I intend Bowalley Road to be a much quieter, and certainly a more respectful, place.So, if you wish your comments to survive the moderation process, you will have to follow the Bowalley Road Rules.These are based on two very simple principles:Courtesy and Respect.Comments which are defamatory, vituperative, snide or hurtful will be removed, and the commentators responsible permanently banned.Anonymous comments will not be published. Real names are preferred. If this is not possible, however, commentators are asked to use a consistent pseudonym.Comments which are thoughtful, witty, creative and stimulating will be most welcome, becoming a permanent part of the Bowalley Road discourse.However, I do add this warning. If the blog seems in danger of being over-run by the usual far-Right suspects, I reserve the right to simply disable the Comments function, and will keep it that way until the perpetrators find somewhere more appropriate to vent their collective spleen.

Followers

Tuesday, 28 February 2017

Heir Apparent: If Andrew Little doesn’t respond to Jacinda Ardern’s emphatic by-election victory in Mt Albert by promoting her to deputy-leader, then he’s a fool. Voters only make prime ministers out of politicians who can see not only what needs to be done, but who also possess the guts to do it.

“JACINDA”, was the only name on Labour’s by-election
billboards. Andrew Little will have noted that. When the electorate starts
identifying politicians by their given name – “Rob”, “Winston”, “Helen” – it
signals a significant up-tick in political familiarity. It’s easy to vote for a
candidate who requires no second name. “Jacinda” has acquired a winning ring.

If Little doesn’t respond to Jacinda Ardern’s emphatic
by-election victory in Mt Albert by promoting her to deputy-leader, then he’s a
fool. Success merits promotion. Any failure on Little’s part to acknowledge
Arden’s pulling-power in Auckland will only fuel suspicions that he lacks the
fortitude to shake-up the delicate factional balance of Labour’s caucus.

Little simply cannot afford to let such suspicions grow: not
inside Labour, and certainly not beyond it. Voters only make prime ministers
out of politicians who can see not only what needs to be done, but who also
possess the guts to do it. Little should tell Annette King (who first entered
Parliament as the MP for Horowhenua in 1984) that she has sat there too long
for any good she has been doing. Like Oliver Cromwell, he needs to tell her:
“Depart, and let us have done with you. In the name of God – go!”

If I may be forgiven for quoting Cromwell a second time:
removing King has become a matter of “cruel necessity”. Having embarked upon a
radical re-shaping of Labour’s public image: reclaiming its former status as a
“broad church” by bringing in the likes of Greg O’Connor and Willie Jackson;
Little now needs to reassure Auckland’s young urban professionals (who’ve just
voted for Jacinda in droves) that there is plenty of space on Labour’s pews for
them.

Keeping King where she is for fear of reactivating the
“Anyone But Cunliffe” brigade would not only flatter that waning faction’s
significance, but also signal a serious loss of political momentum. Over recent
weeks, Little has shown the country that he is willing to march right over and
through his critics if that’s what it takes to get Labour ready for power. The
thing is, once you begin that sort of forward march, you absolutely cannot
afford to stop. Like the proverbial shark, you must keep swimming strongly – or
drown.

Annette King has been in Parliament for all but three of the
past 33 years. She was there through all the mayhem of the 1980s: a loyal
foot-soldier in Roger Douglas’s all-conquering army. Throughout the 1990s and
into the third millennium she served with distinction as a disciplined Labour
staff officer. It’s a fine record, but King lacks the “optics” necessary for
the 2017 campaign. Younger blood is needed at the top. A truly loyal servant of
the party would see that – and make way.

Sacrifices will be necessary on Ardern’s part as well. First
and foremost she must tear up the “Gracinda” (Grant Robertson + Jacinda Ardern)
ticket upon which she ran against Little in 2014. The brutal truth she needs to
face is that, in the eyes of the voters, at least, she has moved well beyond
Robertson. His big moment arrived three years ago when he came agonisingly
close to being elected Labour’s leader. He will not have forgotten, and neither
should we, that he lost to Little by less than one percentage point.

Three years on, however, that losing margin may just as well
have been 50 percentage points. Robertson’s star is fading. Indeed, amidst all
the intense jockeying between Labour, the Greens and NZ First which is bound to
follow a National defeat, he will struggle to retain his finance portfolio.

Ardern needs to move beyond the poignant television images
of her and Robertson on the edge of tears, but applauding bravely, as Little’s
victory is announced. The deputy-leader’s slot is hers for the taking now, and
she should take it. Her star has a long way yet to rise.

In making Ardern his No. 2, Little would not only be making
a statement about Labour’s future, he would also be moving decisively beyond
Labour’s past. Sometimes, party leaders are required to anticipate their own,
inevitable, demise by providing the public with a clear line of succession.
Like a medieval king, they need to proclaim their dynasty’s strength by holding
up a political heir for the people’s approbation.

Helen Clark did Labour an enormous disservice by failing to
prepare the public for the day of her political death. The result has been a Game
of Thrones-style bloodbath as rival contenders hacked and hewed their way
towards pre-eminence across Labour’s seven kingdoms. Win or lose in September, Little
owes Labour a better future than another three years of civil war. He may not
look much like Jon Snow, and “Jacinda” may not look at all like Daenerys
Targaryen, but after Saturday’s victory, she comes with dragons.

This essay was
originally published in The Press of
Tuesday, 28 February 2017.

Friday, 24 February 2017

Together Alone: Albert Camus summed-up his existentialist masterpiece L’Étranger in a single sentence. “In our society any man who does not weep at his mother’s funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death.” Helpfully, he added: “I only meant that the hero of my book is condemned because he does not play the game.”

THE FRENCH NOVELIST, Albert Camus, summed-up his
existentialist masterpiece L’Étranger in a single sentence. “In our society
any man who does not weep at his mother’s funeral runs the risk of being
sentenced to death.” Helpfully, he added: “I only meant that the hero of my
book is condemned because he does not play the game.”

Refusing to “play the game” is a pretty good description of
a rebel. Camus’ hero, Meursault, is a rebel without a cause. Or, to be fair,
he’s a man whose only cause is to live life on his own terms. Depending on how
far you believe society’s claims extend, this makes Meursault either an
existential hero, or a sociopath. Certainly, it is his lack of empathy that
costs him his life.

Of more concern to me than the Meursaults of this world are
the rebels with a cause. Far from
wishing society would leave them the hell alone, these rebels are passionately
committed to changing it. Generally speaking, however, society has as little
time for these mavericks as it does for those who attempt to refuse its claims.
To be any kind of rebel, therefore, is to find oneself an outsider: feared and
resented by those for whom the rules of society are no more burdensome than the
rules of respiration.

These rebels-with-a-cause respond to their outsider status
in different ways.

For many, society’s indifference – or outright hostility –
towards their attempts to improve the lives of its members breeds a
compensatory sense of superiority – bordering on contempt.

“What is the matter with these people?”, they complain. “Why
can’t they see that we’re just trying to make things better for them?”

The self-evident benefits of their proposed reforms
convinces them that all those individuals and groups obstructing their efforts
are, at best, ignorant, or, at worst, wicked.

Either way, they stand disqualified from playing any part in
the processes of reform. That such high-handed and anti-democratic elitism
might reduce, rather than enhance, the prospects of their proposed reforms
winning majority acceptance is dismissed as unimportant. Majority acceptance is
not a necessary precondition for effective social reform: not when you have the
power of the state at your back.

Such is their faith in the efficacy of their reforms that
the ingrained opposition of existing generations of citizens is not regarded as
important. Once the reforms come into effect, social attitudes and behaviours
will begin to change. Future generations will be born into a “new normal”, and
the complaints of their parents and grandparents will give rise to much rolling
of eyes and shaking of heads.

The pain of estrangement experienced by these rebels’ is
overcome by re-making society in their own image. In Camus’ terms: by making it
illegal to cry at your mother’s funeral.

The other kind of rebel-with-a-cause responds very
differently to the pain of being an outsider. Far from wanting to impose their
reform agenda on the sceptical masses, these rebels are forever searching for
the arguments with which to convince their fellow citizens that their reforms
are worthy of adoption.

Because it’s only when the society they perceive as injured
or diseased is ready to embrace the means of its own recovery that these rebels
will be able to do what they have been longing to do their whole lives –
shrug-off their outsider status and once again breathe in society’s air without
choking on it. In Camus’ terms: by persuading people that, at their mother’s
funeral, shedding tears is not the only acceptable way of displaying grief.

In the end it boils down to the question of how
rebels-with-a-cause perceive society.

Is it nothing more than a lump of human clay to be kneaded
and pummelled and moulded and scraped into an acceptable shape – whether it
likes it or not? And if so, what does that tell us about the self-perception of
the sculptors – or should we call them the Übermensch?

Or, should society be thought of as the place where everyone
comes together, and no one gets left behind? What the Swedes call the folkshemmet – the people’s home. Located
in this context our rebel/outsider becomes someone temporarily estranged from
their family. Society ceases to be a collection of human resources waiting to
be engineered, but of mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, longing to be
reconciled.

Revolution means coming home.

This essay was
originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The
Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 24 February 2017.

Thursday, 23 February 2017

Double Act: Andrew Little and Willie Jackson have signalled that, as far as the Maori Party is concerned, the political gloves are off. If Jackson’s comments encourage other Maori to speak out in similarly blunt terms about the true agenda of the Maori Party and the Iwi Leadership Group, then the electoral dividend for Labour is likely to be substantial.

WHAT I HEARD from Willie Jackson and Sandra Lee this morning
(22/2/17) didn’t sound at all like “cross burning”. What I heard on RNZ’s
“Morning Report” was a discussion about Maori need and the most effective ways
to address it. I also heard some pretty frank criticism of the Maori elite and
its principal political mouthpiece.

Neither Lee nor Jackson were willing to repudiate Andrew
Little’s blunt refusal to accept the Maori Party’s political credentials. What
they did repudiate was the selective historical memory of Tariana Turia and her
ilk.

If Jackson’s recruitment encourages other Maori to speak out
in similarly blunt terms about the true agenda of the Maori Party and the Iwi
Leadership Group, then the electoral dividend for Labour will be substantial.

Because no amount of social-liberal outrage can obscure the
fact that the Maori Party long ago abandoned the cause of working-class Maori
in favour of a neo-tribal capitalist system which is busy swelling the ranks of
a new Maori professional and managerial class.

Not that such outrage isn’t extremely helpful. Without it,
the crucial role which the Maori Party plays in blurring the edges of the
National Party’s continuing assault upon the brown working-class might come
into sharper focus.

By interposing themselves between National’s neoliberal
economic policies and the people they purport to represent, the Maori Party not
only protects its political patron from the consequences of its own social
aggression; but it also furnishes its voters with “proof” of “their” party’s
relevance and effectiveness.

The message is as simple as it is cynical: “Just imagine how
bad things would be if we weren’t here to keep all those crazy conservative
Pakehas from running wild!”

The Ratana Church’s Depression-era alliance with Labour was
likely born out of a similar rationale. The big difference, of course, was that
Tahupōtiki Wiremu Rātana joined forces with the Pakeha poor to end their common
marginalisation at the hands of a ruling class made vicious by social fear and
political rage. He knew that the ruling elites of both peoples could only be
controlled by “the survivors” of colonialism and capitalism, brown and white,
working together.

The Maori Party, by contrast, almost immediately shed its mass
base in favour of a cross-cultural class alliance between the Maori and Pakeha
elites. While the National Party’s accelerated Treaty settlement process
helpfully expanded the Maori middle-class, the Maori Party maintained a
deafening silence as neoliberal economic and social policies wreaked havoc upon
its own people. It was a Devil’s bargain: in return for abandoning the
constituency which had given the Maori Party birth, the National Party was
growing it a new one.

It was this shameless collaborationism that drove Hone
Harawira out of the Maori Party and into the cross-cultural alliance of Maori
and Pakeha socialists that used to be Mana. Harawira wagered that his tactical
association with Kim Dotcom’s Internet Party would provide Mana with a parliamentary
beach-head larger than Te Tai Tokerau and sufficient List MPs to make a
difference. He lost.

The kindest thing that might be said about Harawira’s latest
gambit is that it is motivated solely by his determination to get Mana back
into Parliament. The less kindly among us, however, might wonder aloud, as
Sandra Lee did this morning, about the political efficacy of an agreement which
debars Mana from standing in any Maori seat but Te Tai Tokerau, and which
prohibits criticism of both the Maori Party’s record and its policies. Hone
Harawira owes his followers a clearer explanation.

Social-liberal criticism (backing-up that of Turia and Pita
Sharples) will, of course, focus on Labour’s handling of the foreshore and
seabed issue.

In the best of all possible worlds the Court of Appeal’s
unexpected decision would have been welcomed with open arms by a Labour Party
determined to build upon and strengthen the Maori renaissance. Conveniently
forgotten by Labour’s Maori and Pakeha critics, however, is the hostile
political reception given to Helen Clark’s attempt to do just that.

The National Party had attacked Labour’s “Closing the Gaps”
policy relentlessly – not hesitating to wake up the sleeping dogs of Pakeha
racism if that was what it took to reclaim the Treasury Benches.

Already spooked by the “Winter of Discontent” of 2000 (when
New Zealand’s leading capitalists threatened the new Labour-led government with
a full-scale investment strike if Clark and her Finance Minister, Michael
Cullen, refused to rein-in the radical expectations of their Alliance coalition
partner) the Labour prime minister took another step back and hastily abandoned
the term, if not the substance of, “Closing the Gaps”. She was in no mood
to let the National Party hang the Court of Appeal’s judgement around her neck
and sink Labour’s chances of winning the 2005 election.

That Labour’s Foreshore & Seabed Act (2004) was in
practical terms indistinguishable from the Marine & Coastal Area (Takutai
Moana) Act (2011) which Tariana Turia accepted without protest from her
National Party allies seven years later, speaks volumes about the lengths to
which Clark, Cullen and Labour’s Maori caucus were prepared to go to protect
Maori interests – even as they were being pilloried as the reincarnation of the
nineteenth century’s most hateful colonialists.

Those who have spent the last 48 hours condemning Andrew
Little for his attack on the Maori Party would undoubtedly benefit from
watching the movie All The Way. Covering Lyndon Johnson’s first year as
President of the USA (1963-1964) it is a riveting portrayal of just how
difficult it is to challenge the racist expectations of an overwhelmingly white
electorate – let alone overcome them.

To remind passionate seekers-after-change that politics is
“the art of the possible” is to repeat a cliché they have heard many times
before. Repetition does not, however, make it any the less true. To win power,
Andrew Little needs the Maori working-class to remain loyal to Labour. That
will not happen if the Maori Party is allowed to paint every expression of
Pakeha political criticism as “racist”, and to dismiss every left-wing Maori
critic as an “Uncle Tom”.

As Lyndon Johnson put it to his tender-hearted liberal
running-mate, Hubert Humphrey: “Principles? Principles! Dammit! This isn’t
about principles – it’s about votes!”

This essay was
originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Thursday, 23 February 2017.

Dark Days: The unmistakeable, if unacknowledged, shifting of pieces on the American political chessboard: strategic leaking of intercepted electronic communications; mass media revelations of politically compromising information; all points to the intervention of the same Deep State that brought down Richard Nixon.

THE NUMBER OF REFERENCES to “The Deep State” has shot up
since Donald Trump became President of the United States. A term previously
confined to academic discussions of Turkish politics is beginning to appear in mainstream
news stories all over the world.

Driving the “Deep State” reference spike to ever-higher
levels has been the obvious collusion of US intelligence agencies and key media
outlets in the ouster of Michael Flynn, President Trump’s National Security
Adviser.

So, what is The Deep State? And do New Zealanders have any
reason to worry that their own state may not be as shallow as it appears?

Turkey is still the best place to start this discussion.

The secular republic created by General Mustapha Kemal out
of the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire in the years immediately following World
War I was very much a top-down affair.

Kemal and his army had saved the Turkish heartland from
dismemberment at the hands of the victorious allies. For that historic achievement
Kemal was not only given the name “Ataturk” – father of the nation – but the
army which made it possible was accorded a privileged status in the Turkish
state – and its politics.

Without the army, Kemal’s modernisation and secularisation
of Turkish society could not have succeeded. In the 1920s the Turks were an
overwhelmingly rural, poorly-educated and deeply religious people. Had Kemal’s
social reforms (the emancipation of women, for example) been put to free and
fair vote they would, almost certainly, have been defeated. Accordingly,
Kemal’s constitution expressly forbade the politicisation of Islam.

Below the surface of the Turkish state’s everyday
interactions with its people Kemal and his successors created a deeper
structure of permanent state interests and actors. Any political threat to the
Ataturkian settlement would be answered by its principal defenders: the armed
forces, the secret police, and the ordinary police leadership. This was what
Turkish political scientists dubbed “Derin Devlet” – The Deep State.

Following World War II, the Turkish Republic (which had
remained neutral until the final months of the war) acquiesced in the United
States’ diplomatic and military policy of “containing” the Soviet Union and
joined the Nato alliance.

As a key player in the Cold War, the Turkish Deep State was
now obliged to extend its grounds for political intervention to include not
only politicised Islam, but any too-aggressive pursuit of socialism. It also
stepped up its suppression of Turkey’s minority Kurdish population’s quest for
self-determination.

Clearly, Turkey is not alone in possessing a deep state
apparatus. No modern state considers it prudent to leave its people defenceless
against either invasion from without or subversion from within. The more
important question, however, is whether or not the core institutions of the
state: the armed services, the secret services, police, judiciary and senior
civil servants believe there to be certain political aims and objectives so
contrary to the constitutive ethos of the state that they must be suppressed –
at any cost.

There is ample evidence from New Zealand’s brief history
that this country possesses a deep state of considerable assertiveness. Any
perceived threat to the dominant position of New Zealand’s settler population;
its capitalist economic system; or to its status as a member-in-good-standing
of the Anglo-Saxon “club”; has been met with decisive and often bloody
intervention. From the trumped-up excuses for Governor Grey’s assault on the
Maori King Movement in 1863, to the political destabilisation campaign which
preceded the 1975 General Election, the machinations of New Zealand’s Deep
State are hard to miss.

The unmistakeable, if unacknowledged, shifting of pieces on
the American political chessboard: strategic leaking of intercepted electronic
communications; mass media revelations of politically compromising information;
all points to the intervention of the same Deep State that brought down Richard
Nixon.

President Trump should not be surprised. In the eyes of the
American Deep State he is guilty of President Nixon’s “crime” of attempting to
supplant its own apparatus. President Trump’s key advisor, Steve Bannon, has
made no secret of his intention to engage in a Lenin-like “smashing” of the
core institutions of the American state – or, at least, to purging their
leadership. This cannot and will not be countenanced.

Equally, forbidden is what the American Deep State has deemed
an unacceptably dangerous attempt to alter the United States’ geopolitical
posture vis-à-vis the Russian Federation. In the National Security Agency and
the CIA (if not in the FBI) there is clearly a powerful faction which regards
the Trump Administration as having been irretrievably compromised by the
government of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

This is a very big deal. The present situation in Turkey
shows what happens when a populist president believes himself to be in the
cross-hairs of the Deep State. The Ataturkian legacy is being smashed to pieces
by Turkey’s Islamist President, Tayyip Erdogan.

Will America’s democratic legacy be next?

This essay was
originally published in The Press of
Tuesday, 21 February 2017.

Wednesday, 22 February 2017

Pondering The Counterfactual: How many more percentage points might Labour have advanced in the latest One News Colmar Brunton poll had “discontented party activists” not spent the week prior to its execution demonstrating rank disunity and ideological extremism?

ONE SWALLOW does not make a summer, any more than a two-percentage-point
lift in the latest One News Colmar-Brunton poll amounts to a massive political
vindication. What Labour’s marginal rise in popularity does signal, however, is
some very unhelpful news for some very unhelpful people.

Why do I say that? Because the furore over Willie Jackson’s
return to the Labour Party can now be put in its more immediate context.

Before exploring that context, however, a word or two about
polling.

Both of the major political parties have their own
“internal” pollsters (David Farrar and Curia Research in the case of National,
Stephen Mills and UMR for Labour) and both know when their researchers are in
the field. Indeed, they often time their public policy pronouncements to coincide
with such polling.

For very similar reasons most senior political operatives
and public relations mavens also like to know when media-commissioned agencies
like Colmar Brunton are on the job and when their results will be published.

In a society as small as New Zealand, acquiring such
intelligence is relatively straightforward. Most of the people who believe they
need to know, know someone who really does know when a poll is about to get underway.

The fieldwork for the Colmar Brunton poll that was broadcast
on One News on Sunday, 19 February, was conducted between 11 and 15 February
2017.

This is significant, because in the week prior to the survey
the Labour leader, Andrew Little, found himself under vicious attack from
persons (including Poto Williams, the Labour MP for Christchurch North) opposed
to Labour’s strategic recruitment of the broadcaster, community organiser, and
former Alliance MP, Willie Jackson.

That Williams consulted a Christchurch public relations
firm, Inform PR, to shape her criticism of Little, and to assist her in
distributing the resulting statement to selected political journalists, prior
to posting it on her Facebook page, struck many observers as odd. Now that we
know Colmar Brunton was scheduled to be in the field by the end of the week,
William’s behaviour appears much less so.

The same applies to the letter of protest posted on Facebook
by members of Labour’s youth wing – Young Labour. Like William’s media
statement, this document attracted considerable media attention throughout the
week, especially after two former Labour MPs, Maryan Street and Marian Hobbs, added
their signatures to the document.

Throughout the week Little was required to endure the
less-than-friendly attentions of the parliamentary press gallery, as well as a
succession of highly critical opinion pieces questioning his political
judgement and challenging his commitment to Labour’s quest for gender parity.

By the end of the week, the proprietor of the POLITIK blog,
Richard Harman, was reporting that:

“The events last week [5-11 February] seem to be connected
to what has been what one senior party source described as a ‘parallel universe’
of discontented party activists who have been active on the left-wing blog ‘The
Standard’ and who also organised to promote candidates for office within the
party.”

It is, therefore, very tempting to see, with the benefit of
hindsight, the timing of the criticism of Little’s recruitment of Jackson as
something more than coincidental. If Harman’s “discontented party activists”
had prior knowledge of when the Colmar Brunton survey would be in the field, it
is not difficult to fathom why they might be tempted to seize upon the
opportunity to put a spanner in the Leader’s works.

Clearly, there are many in Labour’s ranks who do not like
the idea of the party once again becoming a “broad church”. How better to prove
the unwisdom of Little’s policy than to orchestrate a week-long outpouring of protest
against the Jackson recruitment, culminating in a falling-off in support for
Labour – and Little – as measured in the oh-so-conveniently scheduled Colmar
Brunton survey?

Except, of course, the campaign failed to achieve its
objective. Far from registering a falling-off of support for Labour, the poll
revealed a small, but very welcome, rise in support. At last, Labour was back
in the 30s – an important morale-boost for both the caucus and the wider party.
The recruitment of Jackson and the selection of the former Police Association
President, Greg O’Connor, had produced precisely the effect which Little and
his team had be working for.

The question that cannot be avoided, however, is as
straightforward as it is disconcerting: How many more percentage points might
Labour have advanced in the Colmar Brunton poll had “discontented party
activists” not spent the week prior to its execution demonstrating rank
disunity and ideological extremism?

This essay was
originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Monday, 20 February 2017.

Tuesday, 21 February 2017

The Progressive Sisterhood: In 1984 Labour's women MPs launched a round of consultative assemblies - Women's Forums - to identify the priorities of their proposed Ministry of Women's Affairs (now the Ministry for Women). Unfortunately, this well-meaning exercise in participatory democracy very nearly ended in disaster. Progressive feminist reforms turned out to be much more easily engineered from above than below.

IT WAS ONE of the Fourth Labour Government’s more
progressive initiatives, and its most productive outcome, the Ministry of
Women’s Affairs, endures to this day. It was, however, an initiative that also
ended up spinning out of control in ways that its instigators neither
anticipated nor appreciated. Indeed, so aggrieved were Labour’s feminists at
the outcome of their well-meaning experiment in “participatory democracy” that
its most important political lessons remain unacknowledged and, for the most
part, forgotten.

The election of the David Lange-led Labour Government in
July 1984 provided the first opportunity for Second Wave Feminism to show what
it could do with the full resources of the state at its back. Labour’s women
MPs: Anne Hercus, Margaret Shields, Helen Clark, Fran Wilde, Anne Fraser,
Annette King, Margaret Austin and Judy Keall, along with the party’s president,
Margaret Wilson, were determined to make rapid progress for women after nearly
a decade of government by, of and for Rob Muldoon’s “ordinary blokes”.

Pushing them forward was the Labour Women’s Council – a body
which had grown rapidly, both in size and influence, since the late 1970s. The
consciousness-raising effects of the violent misogyny experienced by women
during the 1981 Springbok Tour further strengthened the feminist impulse within
Labour’s ranks.

Significantly, these new recruits (many of them from women’s
groups active on the nation’s campuses) brought with them the non-hierarchical,
loosely-structured and “facilitative” political praxis of feminism’s second
wave. Born out of the New Left’s embrace of “participatory democracy” in the
1960s, this welcoming political style was founded on the optimistic assumption
that, subject only to their consciousness of patriarchal oppression being
raised by their feminist sisters, all women were natural allies.

That this assumption was far too optimistic had been
demonstrated decisively in the United States by the failure of the Equal Rights
Amendment in 1982. What had, at first, looked like a slam-dunk victory for
second wave American feminism had been stopped in its tracks, and then turned
around, by the aggressive counter-attack of conservative women led by
constitutional lawyer and right-wing activist, Phyllis Schlafly.

The sheer scale of the conservative backlash against
American feminism should have been taken as a warning by Labour’s feminist MPs.
It wasn’t. The Women’s Council simply refused to believe that New Zealand was
prey to anything like the reactionary forces that plagued the United States.

In the context of the burgeoning strength of the feminist,
anti-apartheid, Maori Sovereignty and anti-nuclear movements, the notion that
New Zealand women might prove susceptible to Schlafly’s conservative arguments
seemed preposterous. David Lange’s easy victory over Muldoon likewise appeared
to confirm that the country was moving left – not right.

Buoyed by these convictions, the new Labour government,
guided by its women MPs, was persuaded to set in motion a series of “Women’s
Forums”. Open to all citizens, these consultative assemblies were intended to
set the priorities for and structure the agenda of the new Ministry of Women’s
Affairs foreshadowed in Labour’s 1984 Manifesto.

The first forums appeared to bear out the most optimistic
assumptions of the Labour Women’s Council. Representatives from women’s NGOs
like the YWCA and the National Council of Women, backed by women trade union
delegates, eagerly advanced the stalled reform agenda of New Zealand feminism.
A radical edge to the ongoing discussion and debate was contributed by the
activism of Maori and lesbian women.

And then things began to go very seriously wrong.

In the words of gay and lesbian rights campaigner, Alison
Laurie:

“Now, the election of the fourth Labour Government in 1984,
which is when Fran Wilde comes to Parliament, brought about the establishment
of the Ministry of Women’s Affairs. And prior to setting up this new ministry,
the government had held women’s forums throughout the country which lesbians
attended, and many women were alarmed by the presence of busloads of Christian
fundamentalist women who carried Bibles and copies of the National Anthem, and
who voted against abortion, lesbian rights and also against ratifying the
United Nations Convention on the elimination of the discrimination against
women.”

On one issue, however, radical feminists and fundamentalist
Christians found themselves in perfect sororal agreement: pornography. They
both wanted it banned.

It wasn’t enough. Participatory democracy, far from
demonstrating that all women were sisters under the skin, had proved the
opposite. Outside the funky enclaves of progressive inner-city activism; beyond
the purview well-educated, Broadsheet-reading career women; there lay a
vast hinterland of deeply-entrenched and easily-activated prejudice. Nor were
these unsuspected masses of conservative women restricted to the rural and
provincial bastions of the National Party. Feminists were just as few-and-far-between
in the suburbs. Certainly, there appeared to be many more churches in these
localities than consciousness-raising circles.

Shocked to the core, and fearful that if the forums were
allowed to continue the progressive feminist agenda might end up being rejected
by, of all people, conservative women, the Labour government hastily
shut them down. Yes, progressive women had found themselves surrounded by a
noisy and single-minded sisterhood. Unfortunately, it was the wrong
sisterhood.

Between 1984 and 1990 the progressive feminist agenda was
advanced. The Ministry of Women’s Affairs became a useful and productive
reality. LGBTQI New Zealanders were liberated from their legislative shackles.
Pay Equity (briefly) became a reality. But never again were the preferences of
ordinary New Zealand women so openly and democratically solicited.

Sisterhood is, indeed, powerful – but only when your sisters
can be relied upon to vote the right way.

This essay was
originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Sunday, 19 February 2017.

Friday, 17 February 2017

"Hi! We're from the Professional-Managerial Class, and we're here to help!" The PMC downgraded the common experiences of economic exploitation which had formerly bound the Left together, supplanting them with exploitation narratives grounded in the experiences of race, gender and sexuality. Capitalism doesn’t oppress humanity, went the PMC’s argument, racism, sexism and homophobia do.

BARBARA AND JOHN EHRENREICH spotted the looming disaster on
the Left nearly 40 years ago. This was an impressive achievement given the
temper of the times. For right-wingers, the 1970s were a decade of dread. They
feared that the Left was on the cusp of an irreversible victory. They would
have been delighted to learn that their ideological foes faced disaster, but
they would have struggled to identify the vector of their demise.

But the Ehrenreichs knew what it was. They had even given it
a name: “The Professional-Managerial Class.” (PMC)

In the rather leaden Marxian prose then in vogue, the
Ehrenreichs defined the PMC as “consisting of salaried mental workers who do
not own the means of production and whose major function in the social division
of labour may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture
and capitalist class relations.”

In slightly less daunting language: the role of the PMC was
to explain and justify the workings of capitalism to everyone who was not a
capitalist, a professional, or a manager.

Who were they talking about? Well, in addition to the more
obvious groups “hidden within the processes of production” i.e. “middle-level
administrators and managers, engineers and other technical workers”, the
Ehrenreichs controversially nominated “workers who are directly concerned with
social control or with the production and propagation of ideology”. These they
identified as “teachers, social workers, psychologists, entertainers, writers
of advertising copy and TV scripts”.

Now, if you’re thinking: “Hey, that sounds like a
description of the membership of the Labour Party and/or The Greens!” Well
then, take a bow, because you have grasped the essence of the Ehrenreichs’
troublesome prophecy.

The PMC was already on the rise politically when the
Ehrenreichs’ seminal paper was published in 1979. Its impact was clearly
visible in the Democratic Party where a new generation of liberal politicians
were ruthlessly marginalising the defenders of Roosevelt’s New Deal in
preparation for the Carter Administration’s turn towards the “monetarist” ideas
of the right-wing economist Milton Friedman.

The “turn” in the United Kingdom had come even earlier, in
1976, when the Labour prime minister of the time, Jim Callaghan, told his
stony-faced party conference:

“We used to think that you could spend your way out of a
recession, and increase employ­ment by cutting taxes and boosting Government
spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists, and that
in so far as it ever did exist, it only worked on each occasion since the war
by injecting a bigger dose of infla­tion into the economy, followed by a higher
level of unemployment as the next step.”

If Callaghan’s pronouncement prompts the thought: “But that
sounds just like the sort of thing David Lange and Roger Douglas used to say!”
Then, once again, take a bow.

The institutions that Callaghan’s and Carter’s little
helpers were most concerned to rein-in were the trade unions. Organised labour
represented a dangerously independent repository of economic, political,
social, and, most crucially, class power. While they persisted there was always
the worrying potential for explanations and justifications unfavourable to the
“reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations.”

By the 1970s, trade unions in Scandinavia and the United
Kingdom had even begun to construct practical alternatives to the capitalist
way of doing things. The arguments of class solidarity and collective action
were acquiring an unprecedented degree of persuasiveness.

The policies of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan
eventually put paid to the union threat. But the iron fist of neoliberalism
urgently needed covering with a velvet glove.

The PMC was there to take on the task. They downgraded the
common experiences of economic exploitation which had formerly bound the Left
together, supplanting them with exploitation narratives grounded in the
experiences of race, gender and sexuality. Capitalism doesn’t oppress humanity,
went the PMC’s argument, racism, sexism and homophobia do. Eliminating these
evils requires education, training and a willingness to embrace cultural
diversity. A task far beyond the capacity of the working-class Left.

The Ehrenreichs knew how this would end. With the politics
of identity and the politics of class in conflict – and left-wing unity
shattered. The PMC and the working-class could have confronted the capitalists
over who should own and control collectively created wealth. Instead, they
confronted each other over the barricades of knowledge, skills and culture.

This essay was
originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The
Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 17 February 2017.

Thursday, 16 February 2017

The Rush To Destruction: Anthropogenic Global Warming signals a civilisation in terminal decline. A world owned and ruled by people who have given up on the future. Humanity finds itself in the hands of a pathologically dissociated global elite. Stupefied by greed and consumed with pride, the ultimate demonstration of the power they refuse to give up will be the irreversible collapse of the fossil-fuelled economic system they have committed so many crimes to preserve.

RACHEL STEWART’S COLUMN in yesterday morning’s (15/2/17) NZ Herald
bears eloquent testimony to the global progressive community’s sense of
helplessness. In it she berates herself for getting into a pointless
altercation with a dirty-dairy farmer. Of what value are such small-scale
exchanges, she demands, when the much larger and more important struggle
against anthropogenic global warming is being lost all along the line?

“Don’t get me wrong. All are beyond important but,
ultimately, unless we tackle climate change and right now, there’ll be no human
rights or environment to actually fight for.”

There was one line in Rachel’s column that particularly
resonated:

“[I]t’s time to stop getting caught up in the individual
fights and realise that climate change is a mission that must be tackled on a
World War II scale.”

Another way of expressing this is to treat global warming as
the “moral equivalent of war”. This would require a level of personal and
societal engagement proportionate to the existential threat which global
warming poses to human civilisation.

The reason Rachel’s words resonated so strongly was that
just over seven years ago I expressed remarkably similar thoughts in my own
newspaper column ‘From the Left’.

On 9 December 2009 I wrote:

“If the battle against Climate Change does not become the
moral equivalent of war for all the peoples of the Earth, then not only the
battle, but the Earth itself, as a planet hospitable to human civilisation,
will be lost.

“Our government – every government – must be willing to mobilise the population
as it was mobilised during World War II. Our generation must plant its own
‘Victory Gardens’ and run its own ‘Salvage Programmes’. We must learn, as our
parents and grandparents did, to ration scarce resources, pay special taxes,
and buy as many ‘War Bonds’ as we can afford.”

I was moved to write these words seven years ago because the
leaders of the world were gathering in Copenhagen for an international
conference on combatting global warming. Even before that ill-fated conference
collapsed in acrimony and confusion, I was doubtful as to whether any good
would come of their going.

Seven years, and another fruitless international conference
on global warming (this time in Paris) later, there is no doubt at all that no
good has been done. The rate of global warming is already nudging the
thresholds laid down in Paris.

As Rachel makes clear in her column, these failures are
producing not only extreme consequences in the material world, but they are
also generating extreme responses in the human psyche. Seven years ago people
were asking “What can we do?” Seven years later, more and more of us are asking
“What’s the point of doing anything?”

The sheer scale of the organised malice that has undermined
every attempt to limit the damage of global warming is at once profoundly
shocking and profoundly disempowering.

That global capitalism is fully conscious of the planetary
harm it is causing, but resolved to go on inflicting that harm regardless, is a
realisation so profoundly depressing that hitherto active citizens are robbed
of all purpose and resolve.

It speaks of a civilisation in terminal decline. A world
owned and ruled by people who have given up on the future. Humanity finds
itself in the hands of a pathologically dissociated global elite. Stupefied
by greed and consumed with pride, the ultimate demonstration of the power they
refuse to give up will be the irreversible collapse of the fossil-fuelled
economic system they have committed so many crimes to preserve.

The election of Trump, and the obvious incapacity of the
American political system to defend itself against the madmen and women who
have taken up residence in all three branches of the United States government,
is merely the outward manifestation of global capitalism’s inner corruption.

Neoliberalism has immobilised humanity in the manner of
those parasitic wasps whose offspring excrete a chemical which fatally
overpowers their host’s self-protective reflexes. Aware that we are being
destroyed, we are nevertheless incapable of resisting our destroyers
effectively.

Rachel gets it: “Just about every bit of bad news is
directly linked to climate change. Everything. Oh, and the greed of the few who
are trying to extract even more before the inevitable breakdown.”

She has also, perhaps unintentionally, chosen the epitaph
for the entire Anthropocene epoch.

Quoting the father of evolutionary theory, Charles Darwin,
Rachel ends her column with his observation: “It is not the strongest of the
species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to
change.”

We have changed far too little, and left it far too late.

This essay is also posted
on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 16
February 2017.

Tuesday, 14 February 2017

The Populist Cocktail: Take, ‘Immigrants willing to work for ridiculously low wages preventing ordinary Kiwis from accessing well-paying jobs’. Add, ‘Big cities – particularly Auckland – sucking up the nation’s scarce resources and leaving New Zealand’s provincial heartland starved of everything from decent roads and railways to policemen able to respond when called’. Shake vigorously and decant into the nearest polling-booth.

TRUMP, TRUMP, TRUMP. Has an American president ever
dominated the global conversation so effortlessly – or so absolutely? All those
foreign policy “experts” who argued that under the lofty administration of Barack
Obama American power has waned have been forced to reconsider their position.
And no wonder, because practically every hour of every day since his
inauguration, President Trump has proved beyond all doubt that the United
States remains, indisputably, “the indispensable nation”.

So completely does Trump dominate the global news cycle
that, even here, at the bottom of the world, political experts have begun
speculating as to whether New Zealanders might be in line for an Antipodean
version of “The Donald”.

Others object that the Americans have, as usual, come late
to the party. New Zealanders, they insist, have had their very own populist
political leader for nigh-on a quarter-century. His name? Winston Peters.

But identifying Peters as the New Zealand Trump merely
pushes the question back one space. Instead of asking: Does NZ have its own
Donald Trump? The question now becomes: Can Peters replicate Trump’s
extraordinary success?

The short answer is: No. Trumpism could only be established
in New Zealand by a politician drawn from the ranks of one of the major
parties. Such a person would then have to take his or her party by storm:
over-ruling and over-powering its existing power structures with the assistance
of fanatical supporters drawn from both within and without the party.

Labour’s rules make such a political eruption much more
achievable than National’s, but the absence of a Trump-like figure in its
caucus makes one much less likely. National, on the other hand, has Judith
Collins who, given the right conditions (and they would have to be very
far-right conditions) could place herself at the head of a populist putsch –
but only if her caucus colleagues believed themselves to have no other option.

Because populism is not summoned into existence by the wiles
of an ambitious politician. In fact, the opposite is true. The conditions that
make populism viable invariably prepare their own political executors.
“Rogernomics” empowered Jim Anderton. “Ruthanasia” called forth Winston Peters.
The disintegration of the American working class caused by globalisation and
automation; the challenge posed to the hegemony of White America by rapid and
irreversible demographic change; these were the principal ingredients of the
spell that summoned forth Donald Trump.

What, then, are the economic and social forces currently
influencing New Zealand society that could enable Peters and NZ First to give
the forthcoming general election a populist tinge?

Essentially, they are the same forces that drove the United
States into the arms of Donald Trump: fear of the “other”, and the hollowing
out of the heartland.

The ethnic composition of the New Zealand population has
changed so dramatically since the mid-1980s that native-born New Zealanders no
longer regard their social and economic ascendancy as unassailable. Although
Peters has yet to give unapologetic voice to these racial anxieties, their
potential to deliver the coup de grace to an already faltering
bi-partisan consensus on population policy is undeniable.

What populist worthy of the name could have viewed the
shocking video footage of an angry young Maori woman abusing a pair of young
Muslim women stretching their legs at Huntly and not drawn the all-too-obvious
conclusions about the volatility of race-relations in contemporary New Zealand?

It is, moreover, very likely that the young Maori woman’s
anger was fuelled by more than racial animus. It’s highly probable that envy
was also a factor.

For those whose lack of education and skills keeps them
trapped in declining provincial communities, the presence, however fleeting, of
young professionals from metropolitan New Zealand can only remind them of all
the things they seek but cannot find: employment, income, accommodation,
mobility, freedom … and a future.

It is a potent political cocktail just waiting to be mixed.

Take, ‘Immigrants willing to work for ridiculously low wages
preventing ordinary Kiwis from accessing well-paying jobs’. Add, ‘Big cities – particularly
Auckland – sucking up the nation’s scarce resources and leaving New Zealand’s
provincial heartland starved of everything from decent roads and railways to
policemen able to respond when called’. Shake vigorously and decant into the
nearest polling-booth.

Peters delivered the latter ingredient straight to the
voters of Northland in March 2015. Mixed with the former, and garnished with
the bitter fruit of homelessness and poverty, he would have a political
cocktail of unprecedented potency.

The only question that remains is: will Peters mix it?

Is our political culture as irredeemably divided as
America’s? Are our core institutions as bereft of competent defenders? Is
Winston Peters as blinded by ignorance and narcissistic self-regard as President
Trump?

Personally, I do not think so. If the drumbeat is Peters,
Peters, Peters – it’s unlikely to accompany our collective march to the
scaffold.

This essay was
originally published in The Press of Tuesday,
14 February 2017.

Monday, 13 February 2017

On The Right Of The Left: Raised in the public works camps of the Great Depression; organiser for the Workers Union; staunch anti-communist: Ron Bailey held the Heretaunga electorate in the Hutt Valley from 1960 until 1981. Few Labour parliamentarians have exemplified more vividly the ideological elasticity of Labour's "broad church".

THE FIRST LABOUR CANDIDATE I ever voted for was Ron Bailey.
He’d inherited the Hutt Valley seat of Heretaunga from Labour’s outstanding
Minister of Trade & Industry, Phil Holloway, in 1960. Encompassing a good
part of the Hutt Valley’s manufacturing industries, the Heretaunga electorate
was about as safe as any aspiring Labour MP could wish. Having won it,
Heretaunga should have been Bailey’s for life.

Not that I knew anything about Ron Bailey as I
conscientiously drew a line through the names of all the other candidates on my
ballot paper. (I must confess, however, to hesitating over that of the Values
Party candidate, J.M. Overton.) As a callow 19 year-old, I cared a great deal
less about the personal histories of the candidates than I did about the
parties they represented.

I cast my first vote for Labour in 1975 to honour Norman
Kirk’s legacy. His leadership had impressed me tremendously. From the dispatch
of a New Zealand frigate to the French atomic testing site at Mururoa, to the
cancellation of the 1973 Springbok Tour, Kirk laid down a template for moral
clarity and political courage by which I, and many thousands of other young New
Zealanders, could judge his successors.

I was also voting for the self-evident decency of Kirk’s
political heir, Bill Rowling; the progressive education policies of Phil Amos;
and the radical social vision of Labour’s Attorney General, Dr Martyn Finlay.
Theirs were the democratic socialist stars by which I allowed myself to be
guided. Against such a flaring legacy, the star of Ron Bailey, Minister of
Railways, shone only dimly.

Had I bothered to investigate the background of the man I
was voting for, I would have been, by turns, both impressed and appalled.

Born in 1926, Bailey spent his childhood years in the
infamous public works camps of the Great Depression. In his 2015 obituary of
Bailey Dominion Post journalist Tom
Fitzsimons describes the sort of places that five-year-old Ron would have
called home: “His family lived in two conjoined gable-style tents with wooden
floorboards, a corrugated-iron fireplace, no sink or bath, and kerosene lamps
for light.”

Bailey’s political career didn’t really get started until he
was 29, when he became an organiser for the New Zealand Workers Union. That was
in 1956, and he must have impressed his fellow unionists as a go-getter because
just four years later he was the Labour MP for Heretaunga.

If you’re thinking Bailey was some sort of socialist
firebrand, then think again. Like so many of his conservative working-class
contemporaries in both the unions and the Labour Party (including Kirk himself)
Bailey was a staunch anti-communist. Indeed, in 1975, when I first voted for
him, Bailey was, allegedly, an active member of the New Zealand chapter of the
World Anti-Communist League (WACL) a sinister, far-right outfit with its
origins in Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic of China (Taiwan).

Reading between the lines of Bailey’s obituary, it would
seem that his far-right views had, by the early 1980s, become so extreme (WACL
was exposed as having ties to neo-Nazi death-squads) that even in Rowling’s
broad Labour church they could no longer be tolerated. Amid the dramatic
upheavals of 1981 – the year of the Springbok Tour – Bailey was somehow
prevailed upon to step aside for the affable (and considerably more moderate)
lawyer, Bill Jeffries.

The curious career of Ron Bailey illustrates just how widely
the net of Labour’s candidate recruitment was flung in the 1950s and 60s. The
party was very far from being a monolithic organisation for the very simple
reason that its core working-class and professional middle-class constituencies
were themselves anything but monolithic. Staunch anti-communist trade unionists
like Bailey were joined in Labour’s caucus by radical Christian socialists like
Hastings MP, Richard Mayson. The social-conservative Kirk sat at the same
Cabinet Table as the social-radical Finlay.

For those politicians who prefer their parties to cleave to
just one line, Labour’s “broad church” must sound like hell-on-earth. As a
left-wing Labour Party activist – against whom the Rogernomics-supporting
“Backbone Club” (of which Ron Bailey was the Auckland convenor) regularly
hurled thunderbolts, I can certainly vouch for it being a very hard slog.

What I must also vouch for, however, is that even in a
disastrous election year, like 1975, Labour’s “broad church” could still
attract 39.6 percent of the popular vote.

This essay was
originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The
Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday 10 February 2017.

Saturday, 11 February 2017

Parting Company: Little’s reaching out to Greg O’Connor and Willie Jackson – both of them social conservatives – was a test of whether Labour winning in September mattered more than ideological purity: and the social liberals discovered that they could not pass it.

WHAT AN EXTRAORDINARY WEEK it’s been! Two years of exemplary
discipline within Labour’s ranks have been unceremoniously ditched in favour of
rank insubordination and revolt. Poto Williams’ intervention and its aftermath
have left Andrew Little’s carefully cultivated image of unity and loyalty in
tatters. No amount of “robust and honest conversation” can hide the fact that a
depressingly large number of Labour Party members would like nothing more than
to punch their supposed “comrades” in the face.

Williams’ decision to publicly challenge Little’s
recruitment of Willie Jackson represents the breaching of a dam behind which
huge amounts of anxiety and anger has been building up since November 2014.

The Labour Party’s social liberals may have cringed when
their leader, David Cunliffe, said he was sorry for being a man, but they also
loved him for it. With his enforced departure, the allegiance of his faction
shifted decisively in favour of Grant Robertson. Their champion’s defeat, by
the narrowest of margins (50.52 percent/49.48 percent) left them with no other
practical option except to swing-in behind Little and breathe through their
noses. Three leaders in six years was enough. The party had no chance of
winning in 2017 if it failed to rally convincingly behind the fourth.

It is now agonisingly clear that while the party membership
and caucus may have marched behind their new leader, by no means all of them
were enthusiastic followers.

Little’s powerbase in the affiliated trade unions made many
of them uneasy. Labour’s activist base of highly-educated middle-class
professionals were only too aware that the people represented by Labour’s
mostly blue-collar union affiliates came from socio-economic backgrounds very
different from their own. A party leader who owed his position to the votes of
working-class New Zealanders was unlikely to be guided exclusively by the
policy priorities of the professional-managerial class.

If Little was to deliver to his working-class base, then he
would have to expand Labour’s demographic reach well beyond its inner-city
nuclei of metropolitan social liberalism. The party’s catastrophic collapse to
just 25 percent of the popular vote in 2014 could not be repeated without
throwing Labour’s long-term survival into serious doubt.

Rousing the Registered Non-Vote and winning back the
defectors to National was, therefore, essential to Labour’s success in 2017.
But these twin objectives could only be achieved by making Labour much more
attractive to all those voters who had turned away from the party in 2008 and
not returned.

For Labour’s social liberals the logic of Little’s strategy
was at once self-evident and threatening. Deep down they understood that the
number of New Zealanders who subscribed to their ideology was far too small to
win the Treasury Benches unaided. They also understood that the
hundreds-of-thousands of ordinary working-class people whose votes made a
Labour-led government a feasible proposition were by no means wholehearted in
their embrace of the social liberal values to which Labour’s inner-city
activists subscribed. After Brexit and Trump, the latter were fearful that the
willingness of working-class voters to go on acting as the uncomplaining
enablers of social liberalism’s policy agenda might be compromised.

This was their dilemma. They grasped that Labour must
broaden its electoral appeal if it was to win. But, at the same time, they knew
that if Labour once again became a “broad church”, then their position in both
the party and the caucus would be seriously – perhaps fatally – weakened.

Little’s reaching out to Greg O’Connor and Willie Jackson –
both of them social conservatives – was the test: and the social liberals
discovered that they could not pass it.

Though they could not admit it in as many words, their loud
and very public rebellion against the recruitment of Willie Jackson made it
crystal clear that if the choice was between winning the election, or
compromising their social liberal ideology, then they were willing to give up
winning the election.

They could do this because their position in New Zealand
society was sufficiently secure to endure another three years of National Party
government without significant material hardship. Moreover, yet another
electoral failure would, paradoxically, strengthen, not weaken, their
ideological grip on the Labour Party. As a shrewd trade unionist once observed
of the cynical political strategy of the Soviet era Socialist Unity Party:
“Better to keep control of the losing side than lose control of the winning
side.”

Unfortunately, the losing side in 2017 will be made up of
the least securely positioned members of New Zealand society. Those
impoverished and marginalised citizens whose endurance will be tested to
breaking-point, and beyond, by another three years of National Party
government.

This essay was
originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Saturday, 11 February 2017.

Friday, 10 February 2017

If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. - John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION has long been regarded as the
cornerstone of liberty. Indeed, without the ability to speak our minds freely
the whole notion of liberty begins to unravel. Freedom of expression is vital in
at least one other respect – it helps us to arrive at and recognise the truth.
This is important because, as many philosophers and religious leaders have
observed, it is the truth that sets us free.

The Left’s relationship with freedom of expression has never
been an easy one. Ever since the French Revolution of 1789-99 the desire to
maintain the purity of the revolutionary message has weighed heavily against
those who dared to raise objections concerning the Revolution’s means – if not
its ends.

The relaxation of state censorship is the first and most
important gift to any revolutionary cause. Historically, the sudden appearance
of posters, pamphlets, newspapers and books authored by those whose voices had
hitherto been suppressed has always been the surest sign that the old order was
crumbling. In today’s repressive regimes it is the unfettered use of social
media: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and blogs; which signals the arrival of the
revolutionary moment. Think of the Arab Spring.

In its youth the Revolution hails freedom of expression as
sacrosanct. The revolutionaries know that without it the power of the elites cannot
be challenged. As the Revolution matures, however, and new power structures begin
to replace the old, the criticism and analysis which freedom of expression
makes possible seems less and less like an unqualified good. To the new
occupants of these new structures, it is the protection and consolidation of
the Revolution’s gains that should take priority. There is no surer sign that
the Revolution is over than when the new power elite begins to punish people
for exercising their right to free speech.

By this analysis it is clear that the social and cultural
revolutions of the 1960s and 70s have well-and-truly passed their expiry date.
The great provocations of the Hippy era: think of the Broadway musical “Hair”;
the proliferation of revolutionary underground comics; the human “Be-Ins” and
“Love-Ins”; Ken Kesey’s “Acid tests”; would today be dismissed as either infantile
or inappropriate.

Only last week, on the University of California’s Berkeley
campus, birthplace of the “free speech movement” which touched off the student
revolt of the 1960s, the world was treated to the spectacle of furious students
doing everything in their power to prevent the Alt-Right provocateur, Milo Yiannopoulos,
from exercising his right to (yep, you guessed it) free speech.

In discussing these sorts of incidents with contemporary
leftists, I have been staggered by the consistency of their responses. “What
you’ve got to understand, Chris,” they reply, “is that while people have the
right to express themselves, they have no right to expect that the things they
say will not have consequences.”

If free speech is met with "consequences" - is it any longer free?

Just what those consequences look like can be seen every
hour of every day on social media. Relentless incivility; extraordinary
personal abuse; the issuing of threats to attack (and even kill) those whose
expression is deemed offensive to, or transgressive of, the great revolutionary
“truths” of the once “new” social movements; this, sadly, has become the norm
on what passes for the “Left” in 2017.

The liberal tradition of responding to the expression of
ideas with which you disagree with a reasoned, evidence-based argument in
rebuttal no longer seems to fall within either the ideological of intellectual
repertoire of today’s left-wingers. The only form of argument they seem capable
of deploying is the abusive and circumstantial “Argumentum ad Hominem” –
attacking the person rather than his or her ideas.

In his celebrated treatise, “On Liberty”, the nineteenth
century English philosopher, John Stuart Mill, states: “If all mankind minus
one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion,
mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he
had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”

In the ears of far too many contemporary leftists this
oft-quoted passage will sound either incomprehensible or offensive. (Mill does,
after all, use the sexist noun “mankind” rather than the more appropriate and
gender-neutral term, “Humanity”.) To their way of thinking it is entirely right
and proper that those who give voice to offensive or hateful opinions should be
silenced. If these people would rather not endure the consequences of
exercising their freedom of expression, then they should STFU.

“Those who defy the self-evident truths of the new order,”
thunder its uncompromising defenders, “must endure the consequences –
humiliation and pain!”

What tyrant king or totalitarian dictator could possibly
disagree?

This essay was
originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Wednesday, 8 February 2017.

Wednesday, 8 February 2017

Queen Of Fools, Or Pawn In Someone Else's Game? Poto Williams' very public intervention against Willie Jackson has inflicted considerable damage - not only to Andrew Little and Labour, but also to her own political future. Was the offending media release (allegedly prepared and distributed by a Christchurch PR firm) all her own work, or did someone put her up to it? And, if so, then who is responsible? Cui bono?

POTO WILLIAMS’ very public criticism of Willie Jackson’s
return to Labour has done huge damage to her party’s re-election chances. At a
stroke, her ill-disciplined and (presumably) unsanctioned outburst has
undermined the positive perceptions created by the joint Labour/Green
state-of-the-nation event of 29 January. All of those “good vibrations” (to
quote TV3’s Patrick Gower) have been drowned out by the high-pitched screeching
of identity politics. Too wrapped up in their quest for a gender-balanced
caucus to recognise the strategic importance of Andrew Little’s eleventh-hour recruitment
of Jackson, Williams and her supporters have cost Labour tens-of-thousands of
urban Maori (and Pakeha!) votes.

Little’s own quest: to reconstitute Labour’s “broad church”;
is clearly considered secondary to the Labour Women’s Council’s determination
to achieve a gender-balanced caucus in 2017 – as mandated by the Party’s
recently revised constitution.

The recent recruitment of Greg O’Connor to contest the
critically important Ohariu electorate has ruffled more than a few progressive
feathers. (The Left deems the former policeman to be a rock-ribbed social
conservative.) With the surprise return of Jackson to Labour (on the promise of
a favourable position on the Party List) these already fragile feathers have
started flying in all directions.

Predictably, it is Jackson’s on-air grilling of “Amy” during
the so-called “Roast Busters” scandal of 2013 that is being used to discredit
his candidacy. That Jackson, along with his co-host John Tamihere, were merely
giving voice the doubts and reservations of a great many of their listeners (as
talkback hosts are wont to do) has never been accepted by their critics. In the
binary world of Identity Politics there is only space for rape-culture Devils
and victimised Angels. “Devil’s Advocates” need not apply.

That there were many people living in South and West
Auckland (and across New Zealand) who considered “Willie & JT” to also be
victims of the Roast Busters scandal does not appear to have crossed the minds
of their detractors. That these same people may have interpreted the fate of
their talkback champions as proof of how little the Left has to offer voters
like themselves either did not occur to the avenging angels of Identity
Politics, or, if it did, was considered a price worth paying.

For Identity Politicians the psephological consequences of
such moral crusading are matters of supreme unimportance. According to one
recent analysis: “The correlation between voting National in 2014 and being
male was 0.35, which was significant. This was mirrored on the centre-left: the
correlation between voting Labour in 2014 and being female was 0.31.” Never
mind. That National is well on the way to becoming the blokes’ party matters
much less than ensuring a fifty/fifty split between men and women in Labour’s caucus.
The question of whether or not guaranteeing gender parity should be accorded a
higher priority than winning the election itself is studiously avoided.

As Labour’s leader, Little does not have the luxury of
remaining indifferent to the demographic composition of his party’s voting
support. In the simplest terms, his mission is to move voters from National’s
column to Labour’s. Or, failing that, to lure out of the Non-Vote a large
enough body of voters to nudge the election in Labour’s favour. Attracting
votes to Labour is, however, unlikely if the party is perceived as subscribing
to ideas and values radically at odds with the ideas and values of the voters
to whom it is appealing.

Hence Greg O’Connor and Willie Jackson. For the
working-class people who are, overwhelmingly, the principal victims of criminal
offending, the idea of having the former boss of the Police Association in
Parliament is likely to sound pretty good. To urban Maori, having the head of
the Manukau Urban Maori Authority, Willie Jackson, representing them in
Parliament may be similarly appealing – especially since so many voters already
feel they know him from his afternoon talkback show on Radio Live.

Little’s announcement of O’Connor and Jackson was another
important step in his carefully calibrated plan to reposition Labour in the
minds of the voters. The intention is to change people’s perceptions of the
party. From being seen as the political vehicle for highly-educated,
politically-correct professionals living in metropolitan New Zealand, Labour’s
election strategists are hoping to reclaim its original identity as the party
for ordinary working people and their families.

Yes, O’Connor and Jackson may jar the sensibilities of
inner-city Wellington and Grey Lynn, but they may also reassure less
well-heeled Labour supporters that they represent something more than
dull-witted but reliable voting-fodder. By providing such reassurance, Little
hopes to avoid the fate of Hillary Clinton’s Democratic Party, which came to be
seen by too many working-class Americans as a machine with only one function.
To turn out enough people like themselves to elect candidates not even remotely
like themselves to Congress and the White House.

Poto Williams’ reckless intervention has done enormous damage
to Little’s plan. Memories of the “Man Ban” and of David Cunliffe’s tragic “I’m
sorry I’m a man” comment have been revived. Even worse, socially conservative
New Zealanders have been reminded of the remorseless pillorying of two
working-class Maori men by a swarm of (mostly) Pakeha liberals.

Poto Williams’ unsanctioned attack on Willie Jackson has
conveyed to conservative working-class New Zealanders the following, fatal,
message. In neon-lit letters ten metres high she has proclaimed:“Labour’s priorities are not your
priorities.”

This essay was
originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Monday, 6 February 2017.